The Coral Forest (part 1)

Although the border valleys we'd been traveling through had grown steadily more Changrakatan as we went, there had still been hints of the Golden Desert to them: the low, dry-leaved trees, the sparse underbrush, and the dune-like shapes of the valleys themselves and the ridges between them. That ended when we reached the coral forest.

At first, we'd taken the strange shapes on the horizon for an unfamiliar variety of trees. When we crossed the final valley and climbed onto the higher ground on the other side, we found that we'd only been partially correct. Although there were a few trees, the forest was made mostly of land-coral. Polyp fronds waved in the breeze, catching airborne plankton, passing insects, and (in the case of the largest ones) the occasional small bird.

We weren't sure how to actually enter the forest. The spaces between the coral were far too narrow for our wagons, or, for that matter, the gafl pulling them. We traveled along the edge of the forest for an hour or two before we found a road leading into it.

The road was broad and paved with sand. This seemed an odd choice of paving material, at first, until we realized that any more solid surface would have been just as overgrown with coral, anemones, and various bivalves as the ground around it. Every road leads somewhere (unless one is deliberately participating in certain navigational meditation techniques), so after a brief discussion, we decided to take it.

We turned for one last look out across the border valleys, towards the Golden Desert, bidding our own goodbyes to that land of sunlight and forgotten places. Then we turned the gafl and set off into the forest.

Land-coral grows slowly, and (being an animal, not a plant) it doesn't particularly care about sunlight. The few true trees in the forest towered above the coral, their bark similarly encrusted with mussels and anemones. With sunlight speckling through the green canopy, it almost felt as if we were underwater.

We'd been traveling for most of the afternoon when we came to a fork in the road. The signpost was written in the curling characters of Jingli, somewhat overgrown with coral and barnacles, but still readable.

According to Chak, the arrow pointing back the way we'd come read "Somewhere." The arrow pointing to the left read "Somewhere Else." The arrow pointing to the right read "Nowhere, Maybe," and continued - in smaller characters - into a semi-poetic essay on the concept of locations, the difficulty of distinguishing one place from another, and whether what we think of as "places" actually exist at all or are merely a convenient fiction for the practicalities of civilized life.

This information, while fascinating, was dubiously useful for travelers in need of directions. We eventually took the road leading to "Somewhere Else." That was, after all, where we hoped to go.

A message from the Postbird Service

Postbird's note:

The Postbird Service wishes to express its regrets for the delayed delivery of the following parcel of letters. Please note that this delay did not occur due to an error by the Postbird Service. The sender of the letters, a Mr. Nigel Tangelo, evidently purchased an economy-sized book of stamps from a print run that was later found to have an inverted instance of the Traveler's Seal cunningly worked into the design. While the true version of the Traveler's Seal ensures that a letter reaches its intended recipient, regardless of  incorrect addresses, illegible handwriting, and other crimes against the postal arts (but not, the Postbird Service wishes to stress, insufficient postage), this particular version of the Seal invoked every possible mischance upon letters to which it was affixed, causing them to be misfiled, damaged, stolen, and - in a statistically unlikely number of cases - eaten by frogs. The Postbird Service has recalled all unused books of the offending stamps and devoted countless bird-hours to tracking down, wherever possible, all letters and packages unfortunate enough to have been led astray by them.

In the case of Mr. Tangelo's post, unusually, several dozen letters mailed over a considerable span of time (all, unfortunately, using the aforementioned malengraved postage) had all come into the possession of a stalagmite farmer in the subterranean Queendom of Hxgnnnsplik. Though the farmer did not speak English, some of the letters, fortunately, contained illustrations that she found amusing; she had thus kept the entire bundle rather than feeding them to her stalagmites. The Postbird Service purchased the letters from the farmer for the price of a new hextet of boots and re-sealed them with uncorrupted postage before delivering them. Though it is possible that a small number of letters might not have been recovered, we are confident that the majority will reach you in good condition.

As an unrelated matter, the Postbird Service is currently offering a reward of 2700 Lint for information leading to the location of a Ms. Rubilious Herring, formerly employed as an engraver by the Postbird Service. Ms. Herring is likely to be using a pseudonym, as, in retrospect, she most likely was during her time with the Service. She has been described, by various and contradictory witnesses, as a woman somewhere between four and seven feet tall, characterized by an unusually large and elaborate mustache, an eyepatch in the shape of a nautilus, and/or uniformly terrible taste in hats. If you observe any unfamiliar persons matching any one of these descriptions, please contact your local postbird immediately.

The Postbird Service wishes to stress, again, that the unfortunate situation here described does not in any way reflect upon the ability of the Service to deliver mail in a timely and reliable fashion under any but the most abnormal conditions, and that steps are being taken to ensure that future mail cannot be similarly misdirected by malicious graphic design. We hope that you will continue to grant us the honor and privilege of delivering your mail.

With regrets and thanks,
The Postbirds

Wings of Stone

There are many ways of navigating in the Golden Desert. By far the most reliable are the singing sand rats, who can hear the unique song of each town and city and follow it to its source.* Human Wayfinders, blessed with the rare gift of a sense of direction, are also quite popular here. Those unable to afford a Wayfinder travel by kilopede. The great arthropods are just as home in the Golden Desert as in the Mountainous Plains, though they have to drink a lot, and many order snowshoes - several hundred pairs each - so that they can more easily traverse the shifting sand. Other people prefer tree compasses, which forever point to the living sources of their wooden needles. For a prepared Desert traveler, there are almost as many ways of finding places as there are places to find.

We had none of them. For lack of a better method, we fell back on the oldest means of navigation: pick a direction and hope that it leads somewhere. Fortunately, we still had several days of food and water, and we were finding enough on the way to keep our supplies replenished. Death by deprivation was not an immediate worry. All we had to do was keep walking and try to keep ourselves amused.

We spent the first few days singing and telling stories. Karlishek turned out to have a pleasant tenor voice and a large repertoire of folk tales and songs, which made the hot days go by much faster than they might have. (We traveled in the mornings and evenings, resting when it grew too dark to see or too hot to move, but the air was uncomfortably hot by an hour after sunrise and only grew worse from there.) Mirenza's collection of ancient legends and songs, in the bent keys of traditional Desert music, was also fascinating. As the widest-ranging traveler of the group, my eclectic mix of songs and stories made an interesting contrast; the tale of Gan the Foolish Fence-Builder, from the lush and carelessly governed land of Mollogou, required as much explanation from me as the tales of the ancient and highly ritualized Miravi Empire did from Mirenza.

Garnet continued to speak little, murmuring something about her singing voice being out of shape, but she listened closely to everything.

The Miravi Empire was on our minds quite often during those days. Hardly an hour went by when we didn't pass some remnant of it. Broken pillars quivered on the horizon. Piles of stone blocks lay half-swamped by dunes, still retaining just enough right angles to tell that they had once been the foundations of houses. Markers for long-vanished oases gave names to dry depressions in the sand and invited travelers to drink their fill. At night, we slept in old, half-buried ruins, surrounded by ancient stone and illegible hieroglyphs. Statues looked down on us: the stone-faced gods of a thousand years ago. No one but archaeologists remembers their names.

Every single statue had wings, or stumps where wings had once been.

In the ancient Miravi Empire, according to Mirenza, the ability to fly was considered divine. The wingless were normal; the flying were gods, rulers, cloistered and extremely rare. The highest-born spent their entire lives in towers and hammocks, never once setting foot on the ground. The palaces of the Empire were fantasies of towers and balconies and open courtyards, with more doors opening to the air than to the ground. Many rooms were accessible by flight alone. Others had narrow stairs or ladders added as an afterthought, a vulgar necessity for the rulers' poor, earthbound servants.

Those with wings but not flight were considered cursed and cast out into the desert. Even now, the nomadic tribes that wander between cities have an unusually high occurrence of vestigial wings.

As odd as this method of choosing rulers seems to us now, they seem to have run the Empire quite well for a time. It was one of the most prosperous countries in Hamjamser for several centuries. Most of the cultures in the Golden Desert have Miravian roots; the ancient Miravian language is the basis for modern Amrat, the tongue I have been learning from Karlishek and Mirenza. Modern Desert cities are built with the same majestic, highly ornamented architectural flair that the Empire perfected. The ancient Miravian cities were centers of art and trade and science, each city keeping a friendly and respectful relationship with the aquifrax that provided its water. These generous, enigmatic Desert spirits have probably never been as well understood, before or since, as they were by the ancient Miravians.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, this understanding eventually became complacency. All of this prosperity ended when the Miravians finally did something to annoy the aquifraxi. Accounts vary as to exactly what it was. Some historians believe it was due to political or religious differences; aquifraxi consider themselves subjects of the Rain Dragon (and he humors them politely enough, though he's never shown any sign of actually wanting to rule anything but tides and storm clouds). Others theorize that the dispute was over pollution, or excessive irrigation, or an infestation of imported foreign frogs. Whatever the reason, one day, every aquifrax in the Empire simply picked up and left. They took the water with them.

They hadn't gone far, as it turned out; they'd merely relocated to the uninhabited areas of the Empire. Within a few months, what had been empty desert was lush and blooming, and what had been fertile farmland was too dry to grow anything but dust and heatstroke. The people of the Empire packed up their things and left everything they'd built. In some cases, they only had to walk for a few hours to reach fertile ground. Many could still see their old homes as they built their new ones. The division between farmland and wasteland is a sharp one in the Golden Desert, though; people have to follow the water, wherever it happens to be. Without an aquifrax, the old cities of the Empire might as well have been on the moons.

Many of the wealthiest citizens stayed behind anyway, hoping desperately that things would go back to the way they had been, until their grand houses filled up with sand.

Most of the winged nobility were among them. The new settlements had been thrown together quickly, to give the farmers and craftspeople somewhere to sleep while they figured out how to feed an entire displaced Empire. There was nowhere for sky-dwellers to perch.

The Miravi Empire never really recovered. It took a long time to rebuild even a fraction of what had been lost, and in the bustle, most of the Empire's less practical traditions - such as the winged rulers - were left behind and forgotten. The rough settlements grew into stable towns and eventually became the Golden Desert's modern cities, such as Karkafel and Thrass Kaffa. The people developed new, somewhat more cautious relationships with the aquifraxi. Life returned to normal. Like most places in Hamjamser, though, the cities remained separate this time. They continued to trade goods and citizens and ideas with each other, but somehow, they never quite reunited into a single country again. It's not that surprising, I suppose. In every part of Hamjamser, empires have always been the exception, not the rule.

These days, the ability to fly is considered as ordinary in the Golden Desert as it is anywhere else. The winged hold everyday jobs and mingle with the flightless without hesitation. Many even consider the winged nobility to have been a foolish idea. In these modern times, most places in Hamjamser consider it unhealthy for rulers to be always looking down on their subjects. It gives them strange ideas.

Still, I have often seen the people of the Golden Desert gazing silently at the clouds, or at the wings of their neighbors. Perhaps a part of them still remembers a time when wings could bring them closer to Heaven, and not merely to the empty sky.



* They can even find things as small as individual oases, though they say those songs are little more than brief jingles.

Canyon Town, part one

We wandered in the canyons for several days.

There is, as yet, no reliable strategy for navigating a maze. Their constant shifting defeats any attempt to be methodical. Most people foolish enough to step into one simply wander around until they reach an exit - or, depending on the maze, perhaps something else of interest.

Wayfinders, being blessed with superhuman navigational abilities, can step into a maze and immediately find a perfectly straight path leading to their destination. As none of us were lucky enough to have this rare ability, we were confined to ordinary methods.

Nearly all of my supplies were, of course, in the wagons that had moved on without us. This could have been a serious problem. Fortunately, I have been a traveler long enough to have developed certain paranoid habits. I had with me a bag containing supplies (food, water, pens and paper; just the essentials) for several days. I try to keep this with me at all times, regardless of inconvenience, for just such situations as these. The supplies inside were meant for one, but could easily be stretched to three for a week or so.

Food, then, was not an urgent problem, as long as we rationed our supplies. Neither was water. The river that had carved the canyons was clearly long gone, but water still flowed through them in a sandstone aqueduct above the street.* Steps led up to it periodically. One of the first things we did was to climb the nearest staircase and fill our canteens.

After that… We wandered.

The city was carved right into the walls of the canyons, themselves carved by thousands of years of water erosion. The graceful, flowing lines of the striped stone dipped in here and there to reveal a window, a staircase, an arched doorway. Mirenza and I kept stopping to sketch particularly interesting pieces of stonework or take rubbings of the carvings on the walls. Mirenza was in her element - surrounded by stone and history and the elegant script of the canyon-dwellers' language. She pointed out glyphs, architectural styles, and geological strata with equal enthusiasm.

Most of the layers of stone were smooth - as smooth as sandstone ever gets, that is - but occasionally, we would find one with fossils embedded in it. The canyon-dwellers had added carvings to a few of these layers, so that the fossil ammonites and eurypterids had tiny stone riders or chariots hitched to them. One particularly large trilobite had an entire city built across its back, with hair-thin rope bridges crossing the gaps between segments.

Whoever the inhabitants had been, they seemed to have left in a hurry. The sand-drifted streets were littered with fallen jewelry, broken pots, wagon wheels rusted into arches of metallic lace.

This was when Mirenza brought out the machine she'd been carrying under her robe.

But I shall write more about that tomorrow.



* Anyone who has lived in a city will know that one never drinks anything that's been below street level.

On the Advisability of Obeying Signs

I suppose you must be wondering where I've been for the past few weeks.

I apologize for the prolonged silence. It's far from the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last - but once again, I have been beyond the reach of postbirds.

The caravan had been traveling for a week or two when we first saw the stones. They were small enough at first - just the occasional spire and pillar of wind-sculpted sandstone, striped in layers of brown and gold, protruding from the sand. Desert gargoyles crouched on top of some of them. The stone-skinned beasts sat perfectly still, blending in so well that none of us noticed them at first. It wasn't until one of the vultures trailing the caravan stopped to rest on top of a rock, and the rock shot out a long, frog-like tongue and snapped it up with a squawk and a puff of black feathers, that we even realized the gargoyles were there.

We never saw any gargoyles that were even close to large enough to eat people. All the same, we watched the rocks much more carefully after that.

The farther we went, the larger the stones were. After a day or two of travel, they had become wider than the spaces between them, and we found ourselves wandering through a system of canyons. Like the spires, they were banded in layers of yellow and golden brown, with the occasional vein of deep black running through. Some stream or river - long gone now - must have taken centuries to carve the canyons, digging grain by grain through the layers of sandstone.

Among the group of scientists traveling with the caravan, the favored theory is that the canyons must have been home to an unusually active aquifrax, or some other type of water spirit. Perhaps more than one. The regular flow of water could never have produced anything as complex as this labyrinth of canyons.

I'm still not sure of the exact nature of the scientists' work. Are they geologists? Archaeologists? Historians? Experts in unusual vision? Some combination of all of these? I can only guess.

Mirenza, the avian in the group, has tried once or twice to explain their work to me, but we don't share quite enough words yet to convey something that complex. Geolarchaeolinguistic terminology is still beyond my ability to comprehend in English, much less in Amrat.

Still, I'm learning. Between Mirenza and Karlishek, I know enough Amrat by now to be, if not fluent, at least coherent.

Karlishek, as it happens, shares my love of comparative mythology. We've spent many hours discussing the myths and folk tales of various lands. We've talked about the daisy-chained strings of stories that form the Book of a Thousand Mirrors, which I've only read in translation; the Epic of Orbadon, which Karlishek has only read in translation; the tall tales of the Railway Regions, which seem to make a habit of pushing the boundaries of credibility, so that no matter how far-fetched they are, you can never be entirely certain that they're not true; the strange, unresolved half-stories of Mollogou, which seem to consider endings optional and questions best left unanswered…

Being an insect, Karlishek's face is not flexible in the same way a vertebrate's is, but I'm beginning to be able to read his expression in the way he holds his antennae. I'm not sure where his voice comes from. It's not from his mouth; unlike me, he's capable of speaking perfectly clearly with his mouth full.

On the day after I sent my last letter, Karlishek and I were sitting beneath the canopy of one of the wagons, comparing the English and the Amrat variations of the Tale of the Three Brothers. There are an almost endless number of these - stories in which the third brother succeeds where the older two fail, often due to their foolishness or arrogance. To the best of my knowledge, these stories show up in every culture and every language. In comparison, similar stories about sisters usually only have two. Quite often, they are stepsisters: one good or clever, the other wicked or foolish.

Karlishek sees this as an indication that there are twice as many foolish men as foolish women. He says that his experience has generally proved this to be correct. We were debating this when a woman peered around the frame of the wagon.

"Are you Mirenza's friends?" she asked, in a voice so soft it was barely audible. "She said to find a beetle and a reptile talking about stories."

That sounded like us. My current reptilian appearance has persisted for over a year now, which has been quite convenient in the Desert.

"She needs you," the woman continued, pointing back the way we'd come. "Back there. She says it's an emergency."

It was unclear, if it was an emergency, why Mirenza had sent for us in particular instead of simply shouting to whoever was nearby. We went anyway.

We arrived, somewhat out of breath, at the end of a small side canyon. Mirenza was standing in front of a circular slab of sandstone leaning against the wall, tracing a series of worn symbols carved in the center.

"Finally!" She gave us a quick, excited smile before turning back to the stone. "I thought you'd never get here. Look at this!"

"It's a rock." Karlishek's voice was flat.

"What's the emergency?" I panted. If there was one, it had yet to show itself.

"You see this?" Mirenza pointed to the glyphs on the stone. "It says, 'keep out.' Come on, help me open it."

This, I suppose, is the reasoning of an archaeologist. We've known Mirenza long enough by now to know that it was pointless to argue.

The base of the stone was covered in sand, which we had to dig out of the way before it would move at all. The woman who had fetched us - she hadn't mentioned her name - helped as well. Oddly, she wasn't out of breath at all. I didn't give this much thought at the time. With the sand out of the way, Karlishek and I put our shoulders to the stone and shoved, while Mirenza - light and agile with her hollow avian bones - leaped up onto a nearby ledge and pushed it from the top.

Fortunately, the sandstone was relatively light; if it had been a slab of granite, I doubt the four of us together could have budged it at all. As it was, we only managed to open a narrow gap before the stone ground to a halt and stubbornly refused to move any further.

Even that small gap was enough to get a glimpse of what was beyond. The stone had been covering a natural archway in the stone. Another canyon wall continued on the other side, smooth and banded with the same golden brown.

There was a window carved into it.

Distracted by this, we were foolish enough to take our eyes off of the wagons going by behind us, and it took us some time to notice that we could no longer hear the sound of the runners sliding over the sand. When we turned around, the caravan was gone. Not only that, but when we ventured down several of the nearby passages, they all led to dead ends. The canyons had shifted position, as mazes do.

There was nowhere to go but through the door we'd opened.

The Baffled Banker

Most of the transportation in the Golden Desert is done either by caravans or along the Desert's few permanent roads. The times when a caravan arrives in a village on a road - such as right now - are prime opportunities for trade, so the caravan will be staying in Denemat for a short time, trading spices and cloth and various other crafts for basic supplies. (Apparently, the caravan's pack animals eat truly prodigious amounts of vegetables.) It will be another day or two before I leave.

I spent today wandering the village and painting various things for people. There is a surprising amount of color in Denemat once one knows where to look for it. Like CheChmit, which I visited last year, Denemat is mostly shades of gray and sandy brown. There's just the occasional red door or green window frame. Some people will just paint a few stones of a house, or a few posts of a fence, outlining them in white or pale yellow to accentuate the pattern of the material. It's a nice touch. It has obviously been some time since any of the paint was retouched, though, and much of it was peeling off. It was a busy day. Fortunately, in most cases, speech was unnecessary for the jobs; the villagers and I could communicate just by sketching and pointing at colors.

A few goat-like people wanted me to paint their horns, which took me a little longer to figure out. Seeing the results - only the most intricate patterns would do - several of the reptilian villagers asked me to paint their scales as well, requesting streaks and spots in bright yellows and oranges. Overall, I might have painted more people than buildings today.

The elderly couple I met yesterday have been kind enough to let me sleep on the bench in their garden for the next few nights. Their names are Fenbit and Hasisha. Before coming to the Golden Desert, I had rarely slept outdoors, except in the wild areas between towns. In the small Desert towns and villages, though, it's quite common; it rarely rains here, and there is little chance of having one's possessions stolen overnight, at least in the small communities. Travelers need little more than a spot out of the wind to spend the night. I'm glad to have met someone kind enough to provide one.

I was on my way back there, just before sunset, when I came upon a man standing just beyond the center of the village. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed tweed suit and carried a briefcase in one hand. Sand was blowing into his shoes.

"Excuse me," he said in English. "Could you direct me to the bank?"

I looked back at the main street of the village, bewildered; I'm not sure if Denemat even has a bank. The villagers usually pay in eggs or radishes and don't even bother with money. When I turned around, he was gone.

At first, I suspected that this was a hallucination brought on by the heat. The man had been rather too opaque to be a ghost. When I drew a rough sketch for Fenbit and Hasisha, though, they exclaimed over it, pointing out the briefcase and the decidedly out-of-place clothing. What I gathered, from the small amount of communication we could achieve, is that the man is a wanderer of an unusual sort. He pops up in town after town in the Golden Desert, constantly asking for directions. No one has ever seen him stay long enough in one place to actually find what he's looking for.

There are many stories of eternal wanderers, such as the Hat Man, the Stubborn Postmistress, and the Flying Dutchman.* I'm not sure what this one would be called. The Baffled Banker? The Confused Clerk? The Disoriented Office Worker? Fenbit and Hasisha had never heard of him introducing himself by name.

Whoever he is, I hope he finds the bank he's looking for.



* The origins of the Dutchman story have, sadly, been lost to history, along with the definition of what exactly a "Dutchman" is. Literary historians have speculated that it is a type of large echinoderm. This would explain why the flying is worth noting.

End of the River, End of the Road

Since Karkafel, I've been traveling through the cities and towns along the river Lahra. I reached the last one today.

The river begins with the Neverending Waterfall in Thrass Kaffa and flows through the Desert from there. In most places, rivers get wider as they go, joined by other streams and smaller rivers until they reach the sea. The Lahra gets smaller. There are no other streams or rivers in this part of the Golden Desert, and the hot air dries up more of the river the farther it goes. Numerous towns and cities have sprung up along the banks, diverting more and more water to irrigate their crops, which has only accelerated the process. By the time it reaches Denemat, the smallest and last village, the river is hardly more than a silty trickle. The villagers have to constantly clear sand out of its rocky banks to keep the water above the ground.

Obviously, further travel along the river is impossible at this point. There is no more river. What remains of it is spread out into Denemat's network of irrigation ditches, sucked up into the thirsty roots of the village's dates and drought-wheat.

The road - really just a path by now - continues a short distance past the village, parallel to the largest irrigation canal. I followed it this morning just to see where it led. It ended at a little mud-brick hut where an elderly couple was drinking tea in the shade of a small acacia. They shared a cup with me. The tea was a deep jewel-red, quite strong, with some sort of spice or fruit that made it taste like sunshine on hot metal.

The people of Denemat speak Amrat, a language only distantly related to Halsi. I couldn't understand a single word the couple said. It wasn't a problem. Like other older couples I've known, they were content to sit in silence, and so was I.

In return for the tea, I repainted the door of their house. It had a beautiful pattern of fossil ammonites that had faded nearly to oblivion in the Desert sun. It was a good way to spend the morning. Hospitality is hospitality, even when the guest and hosts can't understand a word the other says.

The hut was surrounded by a small ring of vegetable garden, arranged to take advantage of every drop of water from the vague damp patch that was all that was left of the river. There were Desert roses blooming between the cabbages and parsnips, laden with the occasional garnet-red rosehip. Perhaps that's what was in the tea. Beyond the little ring of flowers and vegetables, the Desert stretched to the horizon, shimmering in the heat, a parched ocean of dunes. It was unmarked by so much as a footprint, much less any sort of path.

It was obviously time for a different method of navigation.

Fortunately, I'd only been here for a day before the caravan arrived. It was late afternoon when the dusty train of wagons slid into the village. The wagons use runners, not wheels, for travel on sand; they seem to be mostly cloth, but I was too distracted by the gigantic hairy creatures that were pulling them to pay much attention. More on those later.

The leader of the caravan is a massive reptilian man named Tirakhai. He's a good foot taller (and wider) than I am, not counting the horns, with a booming voice and sharp golden eyes.

He speaks no English, I speak no Amrat, and both of us speak only a minimum of Halsi and Sikelak, but we managed to communicate well enough for me to ask to join the caravan. (I've found that pointing and offering people money often works almost as well as speech, at least if you're trying to buy something.)

Unfortunately, seats on a caravan are rather expensive, and the fact that my money consists of currencies from over a dozen different regions only complicated things. We were busy haggling over the price (I was losing) until Tirakhai happened to catch sight of the sketchbook in one of my bags. He pointed, and I took it out and showed him a few sketches. He seemed delighted at the sight. With a broad smile, he waved away my money, clapped me on the back hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and ushered me toward the caravan.

Needless to say, I was rather confused. Was he offering to buy my sketchbook? I offered it to him, but he didn't seem interested in the book itself, only in the fact that I had it.

After several attempts to explain why he'd changed his mind, answered by nothing but baffled looks from me, Tirakhai gave up and strode off to one of the rear wagons to fetch a tall insect in a striped vest. The insect (I'm not sure of his or her name, or gender, for that matter) knew a bit of both of our languages and was able to provide rough translations.

What had excited Tirakhai was the fact that I was an artist; they're in short supply here at the tail end of the river. (That explains the state of the door this morning.) He was offering to let me pay my way with skill instead of money.

Apparently, every caravan that travels in this region of the Golden Desert needs to have an artist along because of things called the "written ones," or something like that. I confess that I only had a vague idea of what Tirakhai and the insect were saying; my command of Desert languages, even the relatively familiar Halsi, is still not as good as it should be. This is something I intend to change during this trip. Neither Tirakhai nor the insect managed a clear description of what the written ones are. The claw-and-teeth gestures they made were enough to make me slightly nervous, but I haven't heard of any exceptionally dangerous creatures in this area, and no one else in the caravan seemed particularly worried. For free passage across the Desert, I'll take my chances.

You can tell caravans that have been through this area by the large amounts of decoration on their wagons. It's become something of a status symbol, as well as giving the caravans' artists something to do while traveling. While it's necessary to have an artist for each trip, for reasons I'm still not clear about, it seems that their skills are not always in constant demand, and no caravan will bring along a passenger who doesn't either pay or work the whole time. This caravan is new to the region and, compared to the others, woefully unadorned. They intend to keep me busy.

Being mostly cloth on top, the wagons are, quite literally, a whole series of blank canvases. This should be fun.

Rikanta

Having only arrived in Rikanta two nights ago, I wasn't ready to leave just yet, so I spent today wandering around the town. It's a beautiful place. The old stone gives it a solid, peaceful feel that is hard to find outside of old ruins. It's a town that has settled comfortably into its place. I walked through the streets, following the shade, watching carts roll by and children play elaborately drawn jumping games in the dust, admiring the way the creeping hieroglyphs twined their way around the architecture - though I was careful not to lean too long against any inscripted walls. I didn't want them rubbing off.

Rikanta is a small town. Walk three blocks east, and you reach the river; it's too shallow here for boat travel, but there is the occasional tumbledown dock where people sit to fish during the long, drowsy afternoons. Walk three blocks west, and you come out into farmland, shady orchards and drought-wheat fields where trained shrews scour the crops for particularly succulent insects.

Perhaps "blocks" is the wrong word, though. The town's layout has nothing so regular as that. Inside this narrow patch of land is a maze of twisty little streets that seems far too complex to fit within such a small space. I wandered all day, and I'm fairly sure I was never on the same street twice. Fortunately, there's a tall clock tower in the center of the town, so I could never get entirely lost.

The clock tower is made of the same pilfered castle stones as the rest of the town. It has no clock. When I asked the group of elderly men playing board games in the town square,* they said that the town will get a clock someday. Eventually. When they find one they like. One of the men - who seemed to be winning his game of Hens and Comets, if his opponent's expression was any indication - said that his great-grandfather used to say the same thing.

People in the Golden Desert are rarely in a hurry about anything.



* There is always a group of elderly men playing board games in the town square. This is a universal constant. If it's not the town square, then it's the general store, or perhaps one of the more neatly-kept parks. No matter how far you travel, they are always there. The only things that change are the language and the board games.

If I ever settle down in one place, I hope to be one of them someday.

The Desert Road

Now that the word-plague is cured and the town is no longer under linguistic quarantine, I packed up my things and left Arkit this morning. I made sure to leave before dawn. Travel in the Golden Desert is much more pleasant if you can reach someplace shady by noon.

Arkit is on one of the few permanent roads in the Desert. Elsewhere, there would be little point in roads; an unpaved one would just be sand on sand, and anything more solid would be buried by the sand instead. It would be like building a road on the ocean.*

However, being near the river, there are enough grasses and weeds here (Desert weeds are tough and brown and dead-looking) that the absence of them qualifies as a path. Or, if you're feeling generous, a road.

I'm traveling the Golden Desert on foot, as usual. I've acquired a wide-brimmed hat and some of the loose, blindingly white clothing worn by Desert nomads. These protect me from most of the sun. That only leaves the heat radiating up from the sand, the hot, gritty breeze that smells of dryness and baked stone, and the times - even worse - when the breeze doesn't blow. The air congeals then into something thick and unbreathable, like syrup poured over a pancake sizzling on the endless frying pan that is the Golden Desert.

It has taken me some time to become accustomed to the heat.

Fortunately, my body and the Shapeshifter's Curse I inherited have been as resourceful as ever. My toes have become quite long and thin, spreading my weight across the sand while exposing a minimum of skin to it. My skin, in turn, has developed a coat of scales even whiter than my clothing, with a collection of heat-shedding frills where my hair would be in colder weather. Several people have noted my resemblance to various Desert lizards. This seems like a good sign. The lizards, after all, have had quite a lot of time to adapt to this place; if I can become half as comfortable as them in little more than a year, I count myself quite lucky.

I have become surprisingly comfortable here, in fact. The heat has ceased to bother me much. I enjoy the silence of the long spaces between towns. The settlements of the Golden Desert tend to be bustling, exuberant places, communities of people who will gather around any source of water to build their houses and plant their crops and celebrate the miracle of life existing in the middle of such desolation. I love staying in Desert towns. After a week, though - sometimes two or three - I start to long for the desolation again, for a place where there are no voices to drown out my thoughts. I like people, but in moderation.

I have had many companions on my travels, but silence and solitude are by far the oldest and fondest of them.

They have been good company today. I spent the morning and parts of the afternoon traveling solo, wading through the rippling heat haze over the hard-packed road. My feet fell easily into the familiar rhythm of walking. I passed few travelers. One or two people passed me, traveling in the opposite direction on foot or on faded wooden wagons full of sand-tubers. One woman rode by on a flightless bird, somewhere between ostrich and roadrunner; there were message tubes strapped to both its legs, like a carrier pigeon. Each one must have held a scroll longer than my arm. The woman gave me a crisp salute with one white-gloved hand and shouted a greeting as she passed by. I didn't recognize the language.

Other than that, I spent the day alone. The silence stretched on long enough that started to notice the details of the Desert around me. Even here, there's always something moving. Occasional clouds wandered up over the horizon and burned up in the mid-afternoon sun. The darker shapes of vultures and winged hyenas passed overhead, dismissing me as too mobile for food. The hyenas called to each other with crow-like bursts of cackling that echoed for miles across the sand. Small, unseen creatures rustled in the weeds. Fine sprays of sand sifted from the tops of the nearby dunes. The wind blew dry notes across the brim of my hat.

I walked.

I have no particular destination in mind, and therefore little reason to care when I arrive. It wouldn't much matter if I did. The Golden Desert is a place of vast and changeable distances, impossible to predict; as the saying goes, you'll get there when you get there. People rarely hurry here.

Besides, it's just too hot.



*This has, of course, been attempted in many parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. Notable examples include the Serpent's Backbone, a floating bridge made of giant vertebrae that links a few dozen of the islands of Kennyrubin; Trifrost, an ice causeway kept frozen by imported glacier snails in the tropical waters of Barbaleel; and Skimmer's Path, a road built by the Great Acrobat, who somehow convinced a fifty-mile stretch of ocean to increase its surface tension to the consistency of ankylosaur leather. To this day, no one is sure how he did it.

First of July

If the postbird's message reached you - and their messages rarely fail to reach their recipients - then you already know why I've been unable to write for the past month. Everyone in the town of Arkit has been unable to write for the past month, or at least to write anything that makes sense. Words fractured and scrambled the instant they went onto the page. Letters wandered off to visit other sentences, or twisted and became the characters of other alphabets, shifting as wildly and unpredictably as geography does.

I'll write more about this in my next letter.

The geography of the Golden Desert, in contrast, has been surprisingly unsurprising during my time here. Perhaps it's only that there is so much and so little of it. The Desert is full of vast, empty spaces: plains of dust and rock, hard-baked earth broken by the occasional cactus or scrubby bush, seas of sand dunes with a fine spray of golden grains blowing from their crests. All the geography shifts - with the wind, if nothing else - but most of it is so much the same that it makes no difference. Sand is sand wherever it blows.

The towns and cities are somewhat different. Each one is unique - the more isolated ones especially so - but they are tiny in relation to the Desert. Even the largest cities are needles in a haystack, corks in an ocean, periods on a vast blank page. They rarely come within sight of each other. There are few landmarks in the Golden Desert, and those there are are so distant from any others that they are nearly useless. Travelers in the Desert use a hundred different methods of navigation, some more reliable than others. Many simply rely on luck.

One of the few reliable landmarks is the one I've been following for the past year: the river Lahra. Travel along the Lahra is one of the few methods of travel in the Desert that guarantees water and inhabited lands along the way, and as a result, the area around the river is one of the Desert's major centers of civilization.

This is where I've been traveling. There are many settlements along the river, ranging from tiny villages to cities like Hemrikath and Shast. Like nearly every part of Hamjamser, most of them welcome traveling artists, eager for exotic styles and techniques. My own work has been well received here. A naturalist in Hemrikath was delighted to see my sketches and notes from the Gray Coast, as they included several varieties of seal and saltwater kappa that no one in Hemrikath had ever seen in person. A temple in Hark let me contribute designs for half a dozen gargoyles; a tiny village with the disproportionately long name of Kata-Mata-Hamarini-Kishtarak asked me to paint the railings of their new funerary arena. Other than the disaster in Arkit, it has been a good year.

But again, more on that in the next letter.

Postbird's Note

Mr. Tangelo has asked the Postbird service to extend his deepest apologies for his lack of correspondence this month. He is currently traveling through a region of the Golden Desert where the pipe crawlers have caught some sort of rare electrical disease, causing the normally tidy workings of their crystal brains to degenerate into self-replicating gibberish. Due to the nature of the area, this disease has spread to the town's writing as well. Anyone attempting to read there at the moment will find only a constantly shifting soup of random symbols. A team of expert linguist-philosophers has been dispatched from Karkafel, but it will likely take them several weeks to find their way to the town and get its words back in order; due to the impossibility of writing anything until then, Mr. Tangelo plans to pick up his pen and begin his annual month of correspondence in July, rather than in June. He apologizes for any inconvenience and wishes everyone the best.

Pins in the World

The road reappeared today, leading off across the plains instead of leaping over the Edge. It's a relief, and not just because it means we can get the wagon started again. That abrupt end was making me nervous. FlunDitChukk got the dunderblub started again, and after saying goodbye to the geographers, we set out along the new road. It continued to wind through the long grass of the Scalps all day.

After a week in SuyMaTmakk, I'd forgotten just how much open space there is out here. Nothing interrupts it. There are no mountains, no buildings, no hills higher than my waist. I still haven't seen any of the Scalps' precious forests. We did see the occasional single tree - acacias and lightning pine, for the most part - but most of them had jaglars reclining in the upper branches, so we stayed well away. Jaglars are rather possessive about their shade.

For most of the day, though, the wagon was the only thing in sight that wasn't grass. When the wind blows - and it always blows here - the low hills look like waves, an ocean of shimmering grass stretching to the horizon and beyond. I'm not the first to think so, not by any means; many people have written of the Scalps this way. There are even some who build prairie-boats out of lightweight wood. They have sails and run on polished runners, skimming over the grass as if it was snow. A well-built prairie-boat can hold one person - two, if they're small. You can't take much with you, but they're the best way to travel here if you travel light.

Of course, weighed down with art supplies the way I am, they're out of the question for me. I've never been particularly fond of speed anyway. I'll stick to wagons for now.

The grass got thinner and drier the farther we went. Dust rose from the wagon's wheels in dry orange clouds. A few of the jazz birds started coughing halfway through an improvisation, and FlunDitChukk kept me busy bringing them water all afternoon. Patches of dry ground began to creep in between the short clumps of grass - bald spots on the Scalps - and though the grass still shimmered, it was because of heat, not wind. I doubt this is the kind of country that sees many visits from the rainwalkers. With every mile, there were fewer trees. Instead, there were the poles.

I'd heard of them before, but until today, I'd only seen them from a great distance. Most people on the Scalps believe they were left by the Hill Builders. They do have that look. They're battered poles of black metal rising from the ground, probably five times my height where they haven't broken off. Each one has a different shape at the top. You can see them from miles away, silhouetted against the sky, as if they were the glyphs of a very tall language. If there's any logic or meaning behind them, no one's deciphered it yet.

No one is sure what they were for, though there are plenty of theories: radio antennae, vertical shrines, tent poles, the markers of a mysterious game, the dead trunks of metal trees. A compass will go mad if brought too near to one of the poles. Birds don't seem to mind them; there isn't much else to perch on on the Scalps, though, so that could just be a matter of convenience. They seem to have no effect on people, though those who live near them sometimes speak of having unusually vivid dreams. Whisperlings say they can hear the poles humming occasionally. Some of the humming is music, melodies in strange and secret keys, but it never has words.

They've become part of the landscape of the Scalps by now. Birds nest on them. People build sod houses around their bases for support. (Sod houses have a tendency to slouch, especially when it rains.) Unlike many of the things the Hill Builders left behind, the poles are not made of the mysteriously indestructible hypersteel. They're obviously made of a fairly tough metal - they've withstood centuries on the Scalps, after all - but they've been worn and battered over the years. The poles are full of scratches and dents and crookedness. People have carved words into a few of them. Often it's just their names, but I've been surprised at how often the graffiti turns out to be poetry.*

The people of the Scalps call them Kucha, which roughly translates to "pin." This is why the Scalps are also called the Pinstuck Plains.

Archaeologists have tried to dig to the bases of the poles a few times. They always have to stop when they hit bedrock. Some flat-worlders believe that the poles hold the world up, like the pilings of a pier; round-world theorists believe that they go all the way through it, like a giant's hatpins, holding the world together - or perhaps keeping a few specific places apart. Here on the hairy Scalps of the world, that doesn't seem too far-fetched.

* One had a copy of the Recursive Sonnet on it, of course. Quite a few have nonsense poetry by Carlis Rowell.

Candlegiraffe

The candlegiraffes walk at night. As far as I know, they might not even exist in the day. I've only seen them in the dark. The candles on their heads never seem to go out; they're visible for miles, a procession of bright flames in an uneven line, marching over the Scalps. They cross the plains in silence, traveling from somewhere to somewhere else, or possibly to nowhere in particular.

I don't know where the candles come from. Perhaps they grow out of the giraffes' heads - unicorn horns of wax and string. The giraffes don't seem to mind the hot wax that drips down their faces. Moths flutter around their perpetually burning lights, along with other insects, flies and lacewings and dimly shining beetles. Fireflies ignite themselves in the flames and fly off like tiny phoenixes to lay their coal-black eggs in nests of ash. The candlegiraffes pay them no notice.* The little ones are distractible; they stop to look at flowers and bushes and interesting insects. The adults are above all that, though, and not just in height. They never seem to notice anything. Their feet glide along, invisibly distant in the dark - but they never trip, never stumble, never make a sound except the faint rustle of grass against hooves. I've seen people try to get in the way of a candlegiraffe procession. It doesn't work. Somehow, the line seems to go around all obstacles without ever changing its course; people who try to get in the way find that they've simply misjudged where that is, every single time. The giraffes just walk by, uncaring. They march in a perfectly straight line that never quite meets anything. People seem to be about as important to them as weeds. We are below eye level and below notice.

People have tried to follow candlegiraffes before - scientists and writers, usually, or other members of the perpetually curious. They say that the night never ends. The giraffes seem to follow it, somehow, or perhaps it follows them. People have trailed along after them for whole weeks without a single day. Dawn never comes until they give up, or collapse from exhaustion, and the candlegiraffes move on without them.

Wherever they're going, nothing is going to follow them there. Not even the sun.

* There are rumors that they catch the insects with their tongues, like frogs; if so, they do it so quickly that I've never seen it.

Malanian

During my time in Mollogou, I stayed for over a month in the town of Malanian. It was relaxing - a stable island in a sea of geographical chaos.

Geography is inconstant, to some extent, in every part of the world; this is why maps are useless before they're completed, and why Wayfinders' abilities are in such high demand. Mollogou is worse than most countries. There are very few towns in Mollogou that bother to have names. They are simply collections of random buildings, rearranged in different groups every day, shuffled and dealt across the entire country like a pack of cards. Your neighbors today could be a hundred miles away tomorrow. Mollogoons consider themselves lucky if their houses even stay intact; most houses trade rooms with other buildings, apparently on a whim. Nothing in the country stays where it's put. This is why parents in Mollogou don't put their children down until they're old enough to fend for themselves. Once something - or someone - is out of sight, chances are they'll never see it again.

Most people in Mollogou try not to get too attached to anything.

Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It's one of the only ones with a name. The town is built in the domain of Malanian, the pill bug spirit, which is where the name comes from (it means "Silver Shell" in an archaic dialect of Togol). There are a ridiculous number of local spirits in Mollogou; practically every copse and hilltop has one. No one can possibly be expected to remember them all. The spirits' names are usually written on their shrines, so that strangers (which means practically everyone in the country) can pay proper respect. In Malanian's case, they simply named the town after the spirit and saved themselves the trouble.

Malanian (the spirit) tends to keep to his or herself.* The spirit only appears occasionally, in visions and dreams. During the days of the locust marauders, Malanian is said to have sent nightmares to the entire town and woken them before every attack. Other than the occasional practical message, though, Malanian rarely appears to come out of its shell.

This is not always the case with spirits. A few of the ones in Mollogou have even been known to have romances with mortals; it's surprisingly common to meet people there who claim to be descended from spirits. (The truth of these claims is usually impossible to prove.) Two of the fox spirits in one forest (brother and sister, however that works with spirits) each seem to take a new spouse every century or so. Their clever, elusive descendants number in the hundreds. A Samoval spirit in Gonrang has been married for nearly two hundred years to a man who is immortal due to the Shapeshifter's Curse.

Malanian is not one of these. There are an unusual number of chitinous people in the town - not surprising, I suppose, in a town with an isopod patron - but none of them claim to be descended from the pill bug spirit. Nearly everyone in the town is fond of it, though, and of the ordinary pill bugs that live around it. The streets of Malanian are full of randomly placed rocks, logs, and damp crevices - just the sorts of places pill bugs like. The largest ones run around in the houses like mice (only better behaved). People watch where they step and don't bother to sweep their kitchen floors. Any crumbs or scraps will be eaten by the next day. It's common to see children - and adults, for that matter - walking around with pill bugs on their shoulders or in their hands. They carry them like pets or good luck charms. There's a good reason for this; the town owes its very existence to the pill bug spirit.

Malanian is a dense collection of buildings arranged in a circle, with the outer buildings forming a seamless stone wall around the outside. There are arches through which to enter the town. The walls curve inward at the top, as if the entire town is half of a giant stone sphere.** They were built several centuries ago as a defense against the local variety of dragon. Mollogou dragons are damp, sticky-fingered creatures, more like giant flying frogs than the usual reptilian variety. They are rather insanely fond of leather. They like to chew it. This caused something of a problem several centuries ago; the dragons had a habit of swooping down into towns to carry off all the shoes in sight, and they didn't particularly care if the shoes still had people in them. (People may, in fact, have served as convenient handles, making the shoes easier to grab.)

The people of Malanian (the town) apparently came to an agreement with Malanian (the spirit): if the people built the wall, protecting the town from the sides, the spirit would protect it from above. The spirit's only condition was that the wall be round. As it turned out, this worked quite well. The dragons made several more raids, the spirit repelled them (accounts vary as to how), and they left the town alone after that.*** This protection has made Malanian a haven from many other dangers in Mollogou's history, such as the Locust Marauders and the Laughing Storm.

Though it's not currently needed for defense, this being a relatively peaceful time, the wall is the reason that Malanian is the largest town in Mollogou. It keeps the town together. Malanian's buildings have stayed Malanian's buildings ever since the wall's foundations were laid. The farms around the town still have a tendency to wander off when no one's looking, as all the land in Mollogou does, but the town itself has stayed more or less in one piece. The people all know each other and happily trade with whichever farmers live nearby on any given day.

People in Malanian seem to care about things more than most people in Mollogou. Perhaps it comes from knowing they'll still be there tomorrow.

* As is the case with most spirits, no one seems sure whether Malanian is male or female. It's difficult to tell even on an ordinary pill bug.

** There are a lot of spheres in the town. The spirit likes them, apparently. I suppose that's not surprising for a pill bug.

*** Several years later, a particularly fearless tanner taught the dragons how to make their own leather. Unfortunately, not all the dragons wanted to bother raising the animals they used for leather, so a number of them just switched from stealing shoes to stealing cows. Farmers were less than pleased with the tanner for this.

The Lost Pet

I spent most of today walking a path on the plains. There aren't exactly roads here. Instead, there are paths through the grass, beaten trails of varying width and solidity. The biggest ones are almost what would be called a dirt road in other parts of Hamjamser. The smallest are fit only for field mice. This one was somewhere between the two - antelope-sized, perhaps. It also happened to be leading me in circles.

The paths of the Scalp (some call them "parts") are one of the less predictable forms of transportation in the world. They rarely follow the same route or lead to the same place twice. Some take you to towns or landmarks. Some lead back to where they started. Some peter out and vanish in the middle of nowhere. Some take travelers out into the featureless plains and lead them in circles for days on end, until the sun works its way into their brains and they return to civilization half-delirious from heat, babbling of visions that they can never quite explain to anyone, visions that fade - like dreams - with the sunstroke.

People don't travel much on the plains unless they're nomads. The chances of finding your way to any place you've been before are nearly nonexistent. The chances of finding your way to any place at all, in fact, are less than certain. Travelers on the plains get used to this sooner or later.

I was starting to suspect that the path I was on was one of the circular ones. Landmarks are scarce on the plains, but the last six bushes I'd passed had looked suspiciously similar. Luckily for me, the heat was - for once - not a problem. Back in late April, my skin developed a coat of brilliant silver-white scales and a dimetrodon-like frill along the back of my neck. It makes wearing shirts somewhat difficult, but keeping cool is easy. I wasn't worried about the heat. I was more worried about boredom. I'd been walking all morning without seeing so much as a shed, and the endless lumps of grass were starting to get monotonous. I amused myself by singing for several hours. By noon, the air was so dry that I was doing more coughing than singing, so I stopped in the almost-shade of identical bush number seven to have lunch.

Meat on the Scalp tends to become shoe leather by the time it's about eight hours old. I'd been chewing on the same piece of bacon since breakfast the day before. The bread I'd bought back in KhniLiPraNa* was still good, though, if rather stale, and I had plenty of water. If you travel on the Scalp, you expect to get lost every so often. A smart traveler carries enough food for a week or two.

I was just about to bite into a sandwich that bore a striking resemblance to a stack of boards when there was a scuffling noise from underfoot. "Hey," said a voice from ground level. "Hey you." **

I looked down to see a hole in the ground. For a second, I was sure that one of the hills had opened its mouth to talk to me - this is the sort of thing one starts thinking after a day of walking over the Scalps - but then I caught a glimpse of a dark shape moving around inside. There was someone talking to me from under the ground.

"Yes, down here," the voice continued. "Sorry to interrupt your lunch, but I'm sure your teeth will thank me. Have you seen a centipede nearby?"

I had, in fact, seen several centipedes that morning. There are a lot of them on the Scalps, twining through the grass like elegant head lice with fangs. One of the larger ones had been eating a woodchuck.

"What size centipede?" I asked.

"Oh, just a little one, about six feet long or so. She has spots and a blue collar."

The largest centipede I'd seen was barely two feet long - the one with the woodchuck - and that one had surprised me. I said as much. The voice muttered a word I didn't know, which might have been a good thing.

"Could you look around for her? She can't have gone far. She has the attention span of a drunken hummingbird."

Stalking a distractable six-foot centipede through the tall grass was not exactly an appealing prospect. "Is there any way you could-"

"I can't come out," the voice snapped. "Have you seen what the sunlight's like out there?"

This was like asking a fish if it had seen the ocean. "Yes," I said.

"I've lived in caves my whole life. If I come out, I'll sunburn so badly, my teeth will be peeling. Don't worry, she won't bite you - she's tame."

As I was walking out into the grass, I thought I heard the voice add, "mostly."

If you've never searched blindly for a venomous predator as long as yourself in a place where you can't see your feet, you're probably lucky.*** I'm rather proud of myself for not yelling when the fangs burst out of the grass a foot from my left knee.

The centipede was every bit of six feet long, and she did indeed have spots and a blue collar. There were frogs embroidered on it. Her front legs held the dried-out shell of a large riddler crab; she clutched it tightly, staring at me with a pair of beady black eyes.

We stayed that way for a few seconds. Then, apparently, she decided I was boring and turned her attention back to the crab, wiggling its legs around like some sort of hollow crustacean doll.

I tried everything I could think of to get her to follow me. I beckoned; I whistled; I coaxed and pleaded with increasingly desperate cheerfulness. I tried baiting her with meat, though its resemblance to dry tree bark may have made it slightly less than appealing. Nothing worked. All she did was sit there, playing with her dead crab and giving me the occasional amused glance. Oh, you're funny, her shovel-shaped face seemed to say. Go on. Do something else.

Eventually, it was obvious what I was going to have to do.

When I picked her up, the centipede unfolded a pair of poison fangs as thick as my thumb. I was sure for a moment that I was going to die. She refrained from biting me, though; instead, she draped herself over my shoulders and spent the entire trip back to the hole buttoning and unbuttoning the collar of my shirt. She seemed fascinated by the concept of buttons. The crab fell into the grass somewhere on the way, no longer the most entertaining thing in reach.

It's amazing how heavy a six-foot centipede is. Her legs hooked over my shoulders and arms with the wiry, surprising strength of a bird's talons. I could hear some sort of rhythm through the leathery armor of her body - breathing, perhaps, or the beating of her heart. Maybe several hearts. I don't know. I'm not particularly familiar with the anatomy of ordinary centipedes, much less giant ones.

"Marta!" said the voice when I returned to the hole. "Where have you been? What have I told you about wandering off through holes? Someday, you're going to come up through someone's drain and give them nightmares!"

The centipede - Marta - hung her head and looked sheepish.

"Thank the nice lizard thing and come back in here," the voice barked. "Now."

Marta somehow managed to give me an embarrassed look with a face made of armor plate. She crept slowly off of my shoulder, her head hanging - and then, with one flick of her fangs, she snipped one of the buttons off of my shirt and scurried into the hole with it.

I didn't object. She'll probably have much more fun with the button than I would, at least until something more interesting comes along, and I'd had enough of arguing with giant centipedes for one day.

Besides, I don't really know how I would have stopped her.

* All the towns on the Scalp have names like this. They get offended if you don't capitalize every syllable. More about that later.

** Actually, it said, "hni paka," but this conversation will probably be much more interesting to most of you if I translate it out of the language of the Scalp.

*** Also, you've obviously never played hide and seek with the viper squid in Kennyrubin. I'm still fairly certain they let me win. But that's another story.

Pieces of Mollogou

The Truckle road ended today.

It wasn't completely unexpected. I'd been following it since I left the Great Shwamp, and it had been getting smaller since I left Crucible. I have a feeling that Sedge doesn't have many more towns that size. I said goodbye to Mr. Radish and his typewriter this morning, after sharing breakfast with him and Rumbulligan and reading the typewriter's latest poem. A few hours later, when the road had shrunk to half of yesterday's width, Rumbulligan turned off into what looked like a village made of origami lily pads in a water meadow near the road. He apologized for not being able to invite me. Weight is apparently a great concern in a floating village; they can't allow anyone in who's a great deal larger than they are, for fear of sinking. Rumbulligan is, he said, one of the largest people in the entire village. He is possibly a little over three feet tall. I assured him that I wasn't offended, and he splashed off over a bridge made of half-submerged leaves, looking relieved.

I wonder if his book of earthquake words has anything to do with this. Shaking earth, sinking villages - it's all just a matter of stability. I hope he succeeds in whatever he's doing.

In any case, I was traveling alone once again. The road continued to shrink all day, getting lumpier and narrower and more full of puddles. At around noon, I came to a branch in the river and had to take another detour. The road quickly became little more than a footpath on the bank. I could only tell where it was because the grass was shorter. The branch meandered for a while, looping its way through a jumble of low hills, though even ones that small were surprising after the flatness of Sedge and the Shwamp. I'd been following the branch for maybe five miles when it disintegrated. In the space of a few hundred feet, the water split away into handful after handful of little streams, each of which broke up into even smaller streams trickling down from the hills. Seen from the air, the whole thing probably would have looked like a tree. I've never seen a river branch that way. I counted thirty-six separate streams before I gave up.

Farewell, then, to the River Truckle.

The longer I walked, the stranger the landscape became. The sky here is full of odd, fractured clouds, each one moving in a different direction with no regard for the wind. They collide occasionally. The hills are full of little stone shrines; I must have passed one or two every ten minutes. There are stone animals inside them. Most are ordinary, birds and badgers and giant isopods, but a few rival the gargoyles of Crucible for strangeness. The shrines - and the hills, and the trees, and everything else - have a tendency to move around while I'm not looking. (Geography does that everywhere, of course, but not usually every time I blink.) It finally became truly ridiculous when I realized that I had been walking around the same hill for half an hour. There had been no turns, no forks in the road, but I had passed the same shrine four times. The statue inside was an otter-like thing with scales and a necklace of snail shells. Someone had left half a fish on the little shelf in front of it. I would be surprised if there are four different shrines with statues exactly like that. Just to be sure, I climbed up on top of the hill and looked around. It was quite clear from up there: at some point, the road I'd been following had turned into a closed loop. There was no sign that it had ever gone anywhere - including back to the river. Wherever I had ended up, retracing my steps was out of the question. There were no steps to retrace.

Farewell, then, to Sedge.

I gave up on the road and set off across the hills. As long as I came up on top of one and looked around occasionally, I seemed to actually be getting somewhere. Perhaps it's only the valleys that lead you in circles. I stopped for lunch in front of one of the valley shrines. It had a round, heavy roof that made it look a bit like a mushroom. A man with a vague resemblance to a raccoon was sitting in front of it. I thought at first he was making some sort of offering; you can see them in most of the shrines, little gifts that vary depending on the tastes of the spirit inside. People leave them to thank the good spirits and placate the bad. Some like flowers, others sausages or pretty stones. One particularly reliable one apparently brings rain every time anyone gives it a boiled egg. I couldn't see the statue in this shrine with the raccoon in front of it, and I couldn't see what he was putting in it either. It seemed to be taking rather a long time.

We ended up talking for perhaps half an hour while I ate and he continued to work. He was quite intent on whatever he was doing. I don't think he looked at me even once. I am, apparently, in a country called Mollogou. It's frequently near Sedge and the Great Shwamp, as it's slightly drier and hillier than either of them, but lower and wetter than anywhere else.

According to the raccoon (his name was Num, he said, and left it at that), every hill and valley has a shrine for its guardian spirit. You can tell how friendly a place is by the statue in its shrine. The smiling ones can be trusted; the ones with huge, staring eyes are disconcerting, but safe. The best places have mother animals with children in their shrines. The ones with masks or too many teeth should be avoided. No one seems sure whether the statues change to match the spirits, or whether the stone-carvers can somehow tell what the spirits look like, but no one seems to doubt their accuracy. I assume people carve the statues - though I can't actually be sure; I haven't seen many people here. Perhaps they're self-portraits.

Apparently, no other country could have nearly so many shrines. The spirits' domains never overlap; I don't know whether they're territorial or if it would simply be impossible for two spirits to guard the same place, like two people sharing the same body. Either way, there's still a shrine on every hilltop and another in each valley. Territorial creatures wouldn't put up with an arrangement like that anywhere else.

Mollogou isn't a particularly large country. It's just more fragmented than most. Places tend to be much smaller here. In the Mountainous Plains or the Railway Regions, places at least stay connected; the layout of each city changes from day to day, but it remains a city, with the same buildings and the same skirt of farmland spread around it. People know where they live.

There are no cities in Mollogou. They don't stay together. About the best anyone can hope for is that their house won't have misplaced any of its rooms when they wake up in the morning.

The same goes for everything else in the country. There are no mountains, but many hills; no rivers, but many streams; no forests, but an abundance of copses. Mollogou has just as much of everything as any other country. It's just divided into much smaller pieces. The shrines are content with a single hill or valley because it's impossible to hold on to anything larger.

I was getting ready to leave when Num finished what he had been doing and stood up. On the shelf in front of the shrine was a collection of tiny white eggshells, cut neatly in half across the middle and laid out in a spiral pattern like the seeds in a sunflower. They were arranged with such geometric precision that you could have cut yourself on the angles. The statue receiving them was a somewhat manic-looking owl clutching a ruler and compass (the geometric variety, not the navigational). It's a benign spirit, Num said, but a somewhat obsessive one. It cares more about the precision of its offerings than the substance. When I left, he was beginning a second spiral in what looked like grains of rice. He was using a ruler the size of a toothpick.

I think I'm going to like Mollogou.

This is the last day of June, and therefore the last of my daily letters for this year. Perhaps it's just as well. Even postbirds have trouble finding people in Mollogou. I will do my best to write during the rest of the year, but you should know by now how rarely I succeed in that. Somehow, there's always something to distract me.

Farewell, then, to you. I'll be back next June.

Nigel

The End of the Boardwalk

The fog cleared today, and I decided to leave Chelissera while I could still see where I was going. The Pelirikas left the day before yesterday. I was in the middle of painting KeChorlitrix's restaurant; they came to say goodbye while I was eating lunch. Ranapleximilian and Tessemira gave me a snail shell they'd found, banana yellow with black stripes. If you look closely, you can see that the stripes are actually dense lines of small black squiggles, like microscopic hieroglyphics. I wonder if they mean anything.

I'm going to miss talking to the family (though I mostly listened, especially in the case of Mr. Pelirika). I don't think I've enjoyed traveling with anyone so much since I left the Train.

Without the Pelirikas and their wagon, there were no vehicles of any kind scheduled to leave the town for several weeks. Spiders are lurkers by nature. They don't travel much. Lacking any other options besides swimming, I returned to the boardwalk.

I'm glad I bought the bubble-wrap in Chelissera; I don't know what I would have done without it. The boardwalk - already sunken and disintegrating - vanished altogether barely a mile from the town. The last few frayed boards simply disappeared into the silt. There was no trace of them any farther on. Some well-meaning worker had put up a sign: "THIS ROUTE UNDER REPAIR." The sign was almost as rotten as the boardwalk. There was moss growing on it. Somehow, I don't think the repairs ever happened.

The bottom of the Shwamp was fairly flat, so I kept walking. The water continued to get deeper all day. By mid-afternoon, I had emptied my pockets and was walking through water up to my shoulders. It was perfectly clear; I was able to watch for sinkholes and snapping turtles and so on. When the water got deeper than my head, though, I gave up trying to wade and stopped for lunch. The trees were mostly gnorls and marsh manoglia, some of the easiest kinds to climb, so it wasn't hard to find a wide branch to sit on.* I needed a dry place to unwrap my luggage and take out food. While I was there, I checked the bubble-wrap for leaks. There were none. The inside was as dry as a biscuit - unlike me. A small flock of green butterflies flew down while I ate to drink the water from my shirt. I sat there on the branch, perched next to my suitcase, chewing and dripping and wondering if I should turn around.

It was an unusually beautiful part of the Great Shwamp. Plants covered every surface. There were bladderworts and waterlilies in the water beneath me, bryophytes wedged into the bark of the trees, and wispweeds floating through the air on their feathery leaves. The pink blossoms of splash-me-nots clustered on low branches, close enough to the water to see their reflections, but not enough to get their feet wet. The trees around me were full of beaded moss. It hung down in damp, tangled strands, like long green beards with no faces. It was full of the little beads that give it its name. They start out the size and color of peas and change color as they grow, moving through every possible shade of brown and purple. The ripe ones are magenta. If you touch them, they burst and release little clouds of pink spores, which float in every direction and stick to everything. Many of the branches were completely covered on top with pink dust. It looked like an odd cross between sunset and snow. Within a few weeks, it will be gone, turning a more businesslike green as it gets ready to become next year's moss.

I decided to keep going. The water has to get shallower sooner or later. Besides, the bubble-wrap had given me an idea. I resealed it with more air inside, found a relatively straight stick to use as a pole, and turned my luggage into a boat. It wobbles rather alarmingly, but it hasn't quite tipped over yet. I poled my way through the swamp on a suitcase gondola. I sang as I went, of course; someone has to sing on a gondola. I usually resist the urge to sing in public - not everyone likes impromptu recitals of clock songs and show tunes - but there was no one to hear me but the birds. Several of them joined in with harmonies. Sky-blue day bats flitted through the trees overhead. Swamp koi swam lazily under my suitcase, white and orange or black and gold, a few of them the size of dogs. Tree toads watched me pass with eyes that filled most of their heads. Sunlight filtered through the trees, broken into narrow slivers by leaves and hanging moss, full of dust and late-season mayflies. It was a good way to spend the afternoon.



* I sat in one of the gnorls, of course. I don't trust manoglia trees. Most of them stay rooted and mind their own business, but you can never be sure.

Tetravania

After leaving the Railway Regions, I spent several months last year lost in Tetravania. It's easy to get lost there. It took me almost a month to find someone who would even tell me I was in Tetravania; everyone else only gave me cryptic answers when I asked.

This, of course, was itself a fairly good indication of where I was. No one is as dedicated to confusion as the Tetravanians.

Tetravania is the capital city of Tetravania, one of the four Kingdoms and Duchies that make up the country of Tetravania.* The city shares the name with fifteen other towns and villages in Tetravania. It is centered around the palace, or Tetravania, in which live the ruling family, the Tetravanians. The current Baroness is Tetravania Tetravanian IV. The Tetravanians apparently have no trouble keeping all this straight, though they enjoy confusing tourists.**

The streets of Tetravania (the city) are all narrow, twisted corridors that seem to lead only back to themselves. They break into staircases at random intervals. The cart mules like to take them at high speeds, clattering and whooping all the way down. The mules are very loud in Tetravania. They claim to be purebred - nothing but mules for the last fifty generations - but I suspect there's some llama in there. I've never met a mule who enjoyed hills so much.

The street signs are weathered to the point of illegibility, and no one seems interested in fixing them. There are hundreds of streets, but only about fifteen street names in the city; if you want to find anything, you have to learn the difference between Scatterbell Street, Scatterbell Road, Scatterbell half-alley, and so on. Half the people don't bother with addresses anyway; instead, they'll tell you a building is "between its neighbors," or "the quintessence of stability," or "behind a door and beneath a chimney." The buildings themselves make hardly any more sense. The hotels in the city seem to have an unspoken agreement that each hotel will be named after the distinguishing feature of a different one. The Blue Hotel is bright orange. The Tangerine Hotel is a deep sea-green, covered with painted fish and landweed that drips from the window-boxes. The Maritime Hotel is built of volcanic brick, the Coal Scuttle Inn is patterned like stained glass, the Rainbow House is entirely gray, and so on.

This is actually fairly normal for Tetravania (the country). Practically everything in the country is decorated somehow. The Tetravanians are in love with patterns. It's rare to see anyone with unpainted skin. The mammals dye their fur in stripes, the avians dye their feathers, and the reptiles paint their scales in intricate geometric patterns. Some of them write poems on their backs in graceful Shasta calligraphy. Insects dye the veined panels of their wings like living stained glass. A mammal who bought a drawing from me one day had zigzag stripes all through his fur, black on white, with one brilliant purple one that ran from his left eye to the tip of his tail. The outside of the Tetravania (the palace) is covered*** with the Song of the Running Sunrise, a poem that seems like nonsense but is fabled to predict the future. This could easily be true; no one has yet found a single line of the poem that can't be applied to every major historical event in the thousand years since it was written. The poem is the ultimate ambiguous prophecy. It could mean anything. It may predict the future, but if so, I don't see what good it does anyone.

The Tetravanians claim to have invented the square. The Tetravanian national pastime is Croak, a card game in which you must conceal your cards from yourself. The national anthem consists of thirty-six verses extolling the virtues of the nonexistent Buckle Toad and is traditionally sung backward. The Tetravanians seem to believe that no one, especially a foriegner, should get through a whole day without being confused at least once. They certainly succeeded with me.



*The other three are Castlevania, Wethravania, and a fourth one that no one seems able to identify.

**The word "Tetravania" currently has four whole pages of meanings in the Sconth Extended English Dictionary. My favorite is "a small hooked device, typically made of whalebone, used to remove the seeds from watermelons."

***Except for one space, just above the front door, that holds a copy of the Recursive Sonnet. That thing shows up somewhere in every city.

Endless Tracks

We're out in the uninhabited parts of the Railway Regions. The mountains stretch away in every direction like a rumpled quilt made of trees. There are misty gray patches of skeleton trees, green speckles of fir and hemlock and pine, and smooth expanses of gray and brown stone. Birds fly overhead - crows, vultures, and the occasional Winter falcon. Their calls carry for miles across the empty mountains.

This is balloon country.

They're everywhere. There's always something in the sky - rarely more than one at a time, but always something. Hot-air balloons float by like brightly patterned soap bubbles. Floating cupolas hang like little cupcakes of architecture beneath their own balloons, larger than the ones with baskets, long tubes like cucumbers or stacks of balloons like abacus trees. Pedal-balloons putter by now and then. The people beneath them are visible if they get close enough, turning the rudders and propellers with bicycles rebuilt for flight. Airships of every size loom overhead, massive hulks of inflated cloth or leather or paper with tiny gondolas underneath, casting shadows like clouds on the mountains. Some spin their propellers lazily; others just drift with the wind. They're only crossing these mountains on their way to somewhere else.

The Train traveled all day without passing a single city, town, or village - not so much as a trackside cabin. Nothing but trees. The only sign that people had ever been here was, in fact, a sign, stuck on a post near the tracks. The paint was cracked and faded, but the writing was still legible. There was only one word:

WHERE?

It looked like it had been sitting there for years, asking its impossible question to the silent trees. I wish I had an answer for it.

Actually, that wasn't the only sign of civilization. Passengers on the Train just stop noticing the other one after a while.

After all, the tracks are always there.

The first tracks were laid by the Hill Builders. For centuries, no one was sure what they were; the long, straight pieces of metal just turned up now and then for no apparent reason. Farmers would find them beneath their fields or exposed by landslides. For some reason, the tracks were made of ordinary steel, which is why they didn't last as well as most of the Hill Builders' creations. Most of them had been buried and rusting for a long time.

After the Train was unearthed, of course, it was only a matter of time before someone noticed the shape of its wheels and realized what the tracks were. Most of the tracks were bent and rusted beyond repair by then, and there's no telling how many have never been found at all. Nearly all of the intact ones had been dug up and taken away. They obviously weren't doing any good where they were, after all. The scattered tracks show up in the strangest places. One of them is the roof-beam of a barn near Milldacken. Two others are in a circus that travels through the Railway Regions; they've been turned into stilts for a giant. A pair of tracks runs the entire length of a hallway in the Vanister Museum. They've been used as foundation pilings in Golgoolian, fence posts in the High Fields, and pillars and railings in several of the floating cities, where metal is lighter than air. According to one of my fellow passengers, one piece of track has made it all the way to the Golden Desert; a crinkle-bagel vendor in Thrass Kaffa uses it as a frying pan. Little pastries sizzle in the Desert sun, lined up in a row on top of the old steel.

As a result of all of this, when the Train was finally repaired and began running again, there was more or less no track for it. A few sections had survived, but it could have crossed all of them together in about two minutes. The Engineers had to lay their own tracks for several years.

Of course, once it became obvious that the Train was the best thing to ever happen to travel in the Railway Regions, every town and city wanted the tracks to come to it. The railroad doubled in length within the first few years.

It's fairly simple for a town to connect to the railroad. The people just add a small circle of track to their station - usually with one side hidden, so that it's not held in place by people looking at it - and within a few days, the track going through the station is just another part of the railroad. Instead of going in a circle, it continues out of the town in both directions. There is only one track in the Railway Regions. Any set of rails laid on the ground will become part of it sooner or later.

Strangely, it's continued to grow over the years. Each town only adds one or two hundred feet of track - not enough to even reach the edge of town, in most cases - but the rails still stretch across the mountains for miles.

No one puts tracks in the middle of the wilderness. They're there anyway. The railroad may have been started by hand in towns and cities, but most of it has grown all by itself.